In Angola, where the local currency is all but worthless, people use cans of imported beer as a means of exchange: a very heavy sort of money, but at least you can buy bananas and fish with it. In Zambia, some people pour a little beer onto the ground in the doorways of their huts to placate the ancestors. The supplicant says: ‘Be cool, as water is cool. Do not trouble the children. Let us all prosper. Here is your beer.’

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.